All I knew was her brains tasted like chocolate cheesecake does to a dieter. A little slice of heaven.

“Better than fish, eh, matey?” Ros asked, munching on pieces of the captain. Ros’s face was Technicolor mold-an autumn of reds, browns, and golds.

“Arrrrr,” I said, tilting my head to the side and squinting one eye closed in the universal pirate face.

“Arrrrr,” Ros replied, baring his teeth.

Shiver me timbers. Yo-ho-ho and a bottle of rum. I was a parrot-on-the-shoulder, peg-leg, skull-and-crossbones badass mother-fucker.

Shit, pirates ain’t got nothing on us zombies.

AFTER OUR MEAL, we regrouped on the poop deck. Ros was lying on his side, picking his teeth with a piece of wood. He pulled out a black molar and threw it into the lake. A bird landed on the railing of the boat, some water creature with stilt legs and a long orange beak. She looked at us with eyes blank as a zombie’s; no one moved to eat her, full as we were with dead flesh. She squawked once and flew off.

Judging from the sun and the mildness of the wind, it was early spring.

Joan made a noise like a drowning cat and took off her waterproof backpack. The top was ripped open, the zipper broken. She turned it upside down. Water, brine shrimp, and plants tumbled out, but no Isaac. In the passion of our feeding, we’d forgotten him. Where was our red-eyed devil baby? Guts ran to Joan and pounded his fists on her squishy bosom.

“In the lake,” Ros said. “But not dead. Never dead.”

Ros was right. Isaac would wash up on shore one day, ravaged by the lake and its fish, perhaps little more than a skeleton, but ravenous nevertheless.

Brains, Part II: Isaac’s Revenge.

We all looked rancid. Annie’s cheek had a gaping hole ringed with brown blood and leeches; Ros was missing a few fetid fingers, probably eaten by fish; we all carried snails, weeds, shells, and clams in our hair and pockets, clinging to our clothes and flesh. Joan stuck a finger in her ear and out popped a minnow. Guts picked the weeds out of her eyeball.

“What’s the plan, captain?” Ros asked.

Wavelets slapped against the stern or the bow or the fore or the aft. The clouds looked like ducks or demons or Africa. In between them, a plane flew.

It had been a cold winter for zombies. If planes were flying.

I stood up and removed my water gear. Time for a checkup; everyone did the same. We formed a circle and examined each other. Guts’s guts were gray worms; Ros’s ribs poked through his chest and the tip of his penis was gone; moss was growing on Annie’s stomach. What looked like cottage cheese covered Joan’s chest, and all of our hair was falling out.

I was afraid to look down at my own body, although it had betrayed me long ago. I nodded at Joan and mimed sewing, taping, healing.

“First aid kit,” Ros said. “Down below.” Joan saluted and turned on her heel.

It took hours to save us, from flies and their maggots, from fluvial decay and skeletonization. Saint Joan worked on each of us in turn. Guts helped her, scraping rot like barnacles, sewing up holes, and wrapping tape around softening bones. Guts found a paint set somewhere below and with it, Joan became an artist as well as a mortician, coloring our faces with pinks, peaches, and browns, reddening our lips. Preparing our bodies for viewing. Or for war.

Joan sewed a tarp over my torso; it crinkled when I moved, but it was firmer than my own flesh. I fiddled with the boat’s radio. The battery was dead. I found a few guns under one of the cots. Although Annie was shell-shocked, more Annabel Lee than Annie Oakley, she smiled at me when I pressed one of the guns into her hand, and that old light gleamed in her eye; she wasn’t totally gone, not yet. I set an empty water bottle on the edge of the ship. Annie took aim and nailed it.

“Atta girl!” Ros said. “Knew you were in there.” Joan was fitting a pair of pantyhose over his ribs; she paused to smile maternally at Annie. “Where to?” Ros asked.

I gestured at the horizon as if to say, “Wherever the wind takes us, soldier boy, whichever way the wind blows.”

“Roger that,” Ros said.

After we were all patched up and dressed-praise Saint Joan, miracle worker-Ros and I hauled anchor and the boat headed west with the wind, chasing the sun and the Joads and the stars in Hollywood. Our own Manifest Destiny.

Guts hung over the edge of Maria Sangria, scanning the water’s surface for Isaac. The rest of us joined him. The sun was setting, turning the shifting clouds orange. It looked unreal, like an orange juice commercial or a glossy ad for a subdivision built around golf.

Ros spread his arms apart. “I’m the king of the world!” he yelled.

We all got the reference. Titanic. Gigantic. The future’s so bright, we gotta eat brains.

Over half-decayed and Ros was still a clever boy. Iceberg of America, here we come.

CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

THE WATER WAS all kinds of blue, the blue of cleaning fluid and electric Kool-Aid, the blue of the American flag and Indian belt buckles, the blue of the blood pooled in the bottom of a corpse. It glinted like diamonds as we headed west.

Go in one direction long enough, and you’re bound to get somewhere. Even if it’s right back where you started.

Because it’s the journey that counts, isn’t it?

“Who do you think is left?” Ros asked, rolling on the deck like a rag doll, as if his bones had liquefied. And maybe they had. “Man or zombieman?”

Annie tossed a frying pan in the air and shot it. “Hey!” Ros yelled. “Bullets don’t grow on trees.” She pulled off her middle finger and gave it to him.

“I get it,” he said, scratching his cheek with her finger. “Very funny. But just more work for Joan.”

Annie grabbed her finger and stomped over to Joan, her bitten ass a gelatinous mass of jiggle. She glared at Ros while Joan sewed the digit back on.

Guts shrieked and scrambled down from the crow’s nest, binoculars hanging from his neck. He pointed west and handed the binoculars to me.

Chicago was in the distant horizon. The skyline looked like a diorama of a skyline; the antennae on top of the Sears Tower looked like cockroach antennae.

Chicago. Where Stein lived and died, and last we checked, where zombies ruled.

“What’s out there?” Ros asked, reaching for the binoculars. I gave them to him. “Holy shit,” he said. “The Windy City. How the fuck did we end up back here?”

Full circle, I wanted to say.

And wherever you go, there you are.

Ros offered the binoculars to Annie, but she wouldn’t take them. She clutched Joan instead, burying her head in what was left of the matron’s bosom, which was clad once again in the nurse’s uniform. The two of them headed below deck.

We had time before we hit the shore of Lake Michigan, and I had to prepare for what we might encounter. If zombies met us, I would recruit for the revolution, the next step in our evolution, using simple illustrations like a newspaper comic strip.

It was more likely, however, that humans would be waiting with bullets and bombs, Rambos with ammo belts crisscrossing their bare chests, hell-bent on our destruction. For their own preservation, of course, and who could blame them?

We all want to survive.

I shuffled below deck with the women. I was looking for paper and cardboard, markers, paints, and pens. Writing is my superpower and it would save us.

Like the old IBM command goes: Think.

OUR BOAT SAILED toward Navy Pier as if someone were steering. As we drew near, the humans spotted us. Guts was in the crow’s nest-he loved it up there, alone with the wind-when they sent up a flare. Guts fell down the mast and thumped on the deck, a puddle of slime forming immediately under his head.