This was no symbolic eating, no representational wafer. We didn’t just break bread-we broke flesh; we drank blood. It was a living Eucharist.

Lucy’s still in me now. Transubstantiation. Her remains remain. Forever and ever. Amen.

EVE AND ME, underneath the fryer. She was hot and feverish, barely breathing. Her skin was pale green, an anemic summer shoot. A fading spear of summer grass. That’s Zombie Walt Whitman by the way. He never died either; look for him under your boot soles.

Soon the senseless masses would raid the rest stop. Whitman’s catalogue of Americans: the farmer and the cobbler; the carpenter and the lunatic. The poet and the priest. Zombies, every single one.

I locked and barricaded the doors. Eve’s moment of transformation was private; it belonged to us alone.

I FELT THEM before I heard them, before the humans even smelled their rot, their arrival heralded by a tingle in my shoulder, like when your foot falls asleep and you stamp it, waiting for the blood to return, the pinpricks to subside.

I welcomed the coming of the flock this time. I am more alive when I’m with them. We zombies are nothing more than a flesh-eating ant colony, but without a queen.

Because was anyone in charge? Could we even have a leader?

Death rattled like a snake in Eve’s throat, and she closed her eyes. When she opened them again, I had my bride.

She was even whiter than before with a hint of sea-foam green. Her wrist had stopped bleeding; it was a scabbed and black stump, the bones poking through. They were thin and fragile looking, more balsa wood than dinosaur fossil. Girl could have used some calcium supplements. Of course, she didn’t have to worry about osteoporosis anymore.

All she had to worry about was brains.

If my dick worked, we might have made love.

Urge and urge and urge-

Always the procreant urge of the world.

I fashioned a leash of sorts for Eve. In the frenzy of a feeding or while running from a lynch mob, I didn’t want to lose her. The rope was tied securely around her chest, underneath her breasts and above the rise of her belly, and attached to my belt. I would’ve preferred to hold the rope in my hand, but I didn’t trust my flesh. One good yank and my arm could fall off.

First things first: the wedding feast.

We left the McDonald’s and headed for the Travel Center. Where chaos was king. Zombies were advancing toward the building in an unrelenting march; humans took potshots at their heads from the safety of the diner and gift shop.

Shambling, that’s what the deplorable Max Brooks calls our gait. His book The Zombie Survival Guide was once shelved in the humor section of your local bookstore. Now every redneck and zombie hunter from here to California has a copy in his glove compartment and uses it as an actual survival guide. Every word turned out to be true. How’s that for postmodern irony.

We exist in a season born of pulp fiction and video games, B movies and comic books. The word made flesh wound.

Any minute I expected to see Peter Cottontail hopping down the bunny trail with a basket of brightly colored eggs.

I led Eve back to the El Dorado-that mythic city of gold cum luxury Cadillac-and pacing around the vehicle was a man I took to be her husband. Or at least the father of the child.

Or, as I thought of him, wedding cake.

I pushed her out a few feet in front of me and hid as best I could behind her. Eve took a few steps forward, moaning.

“Susan!” Eve’s lover cried when he saw her.

His eyes followed the rope connecting her to me. They took in her pallor, her shamble, her vacant eyes and inarticulate groans. He raised his rifle and aimed for her head. He grimaced and lowered the rifle.

I was betting baby would save us.

Lover was wearing a Night of the Living Dead T-shirt, which I took in the spirit it was no doubt intended-satirical, cynical, detached. Youthful, knowing, and hip, like being a 9/11 victim for Halloween 2001. Which I was. “Too soon,” everyone at the party said, booing and hissing, when I showed up wearing a business suit and covered in dust. “Too soon.”

“Oh, Susan,” Lover cried again, his shoulders drooping.

Eve and I moved toward our first meal together. The eating of her former partner would sanctify our relationship, like the lighting of the unity candle. Nothing is taboo once you’ve scarfed down your lover.

He raised his rifle again and cocked it. He fired and hit Eve in the shoulder. She flinched but kept walking.

“Forgive me,” he said as he recocked his weapon. “Lord forgive me.”

I held my hands out in front of me like a statue of Jesus standing on top of the highest hill in some third-world village, His hands blessing the people below, protecting all. I opened my mouth to say, “Believe in me, my son, and you shall be forgiven.”

“Mooooooorah,” I said instead. Which was perhaps my most articulate moan yet.

He fired again and blew off Eve’s ear. It flew past me, wavy and surreal, like van Gogh’s ear. We’re not zombies, I thought, we’re artists. We’re not artists, we’re paintings. Cannibalistic Sunflowers. Whistler’s Zombie. Zombie Descending Stairs. Moaning Lisa.

Eve and I fell on him. I wish I could say we were graceful as ballerinas, but ours is a clumsy, awkward race. Lover dropped his rifle. Eve bared her teeth in his face and he retched at her breath. It’s a scene familiar to us all: Lovers in the morning turn to each other in bed, and both open their mouths to say, “Did you have any dreams, sweetheart?” And both pull back from the vestiges of last night’s beer or cheesecake, the buildup of plaque, decay, and death in the other’s mouth. A reminder that our bodies are science experiments, laboratories of bacteria. Ever-changing and evolving.

I let Eve take the first bite; she was, after all, eating for two.

Like a good little zompire, she went for the neck and hit the jugular. Blood spurted up, the money shot. She slurped the veins like lo mein, sitting back on her heels, her chin and mouth covered in blood, ropy sinews hanging out of her delicate overbite like this was the spaghetti-eating scene in Lady and the Tramp. A third of Lover’s neck was gone. I grabbed his head and gave it a good turn and off it came. Lover’s eyes blinked once, then his soul left the building.

I presented the head to Eve. She clutched its shaggy hair with her remaining hand and buried her face in the open end, bobbing for brains. I plunged my hands into Lover’s stomach, ripped out the intestines, and shoved them in my mouth. They tasted like sour milk and I liked it.

I looked at Eve and she appeared to be smiling, but I couldn’t be sure. Do dolphins actually smile? Dogs?

Fig leaf, I thought as I gazed at my bride. Serpent.