III
[Channel 4. Educational Channel]
In the early hours of the morning yesterday, Containment Zone 7 in the center of Tokyo collapsed. The mob of zombies destroyed the barriers and attacked the self-defense forces. The troops deployed could do little to control the situation in the metropolitan area of the Japanese capital. According to experts from the Institute of Zombie Research in Yokohama, the overpopulation of the mega metropolis caused a “critical mass” of living dead that proved uncontrollable.
[Channel 6. Cubavisión]
The United States Congress approved a law that authorizes the use of automatic and assault weapons within the areas of “zombie danger” after losing control of Oklahoma and New Orleans due to attacks by the living dead. Protesters gathered in Washington this afternoon, fearful that the use of assault weapons will be widespread in areas of “zombie risk” or “zombie quarantine”. The United States saw itself forced to annul its strict arms control, so hard-won by the Democrats in Congress, after the outbreak of the Z virus.
[Channel 12. Educational Channel 2]
Israeli authorities have assured that the so-called zombie problem is controlled within the boundaries of Jerusalem and that Tel Aviv is currently under zombie quarantine. The Health Minister, in a press conference with the Minister of the Interior, accused the Palestine Liberation Organization Hamas of using zombies in suicide attacks against military targets in Gaza.
[Channel 27. Canal Habana]
Members of the G-8, meeting yesterday in Copenhagen, discussed a possible sanction of the Security Council against the Russian Federation for using tactical nuclear weaponry against a town contaminated with the Z virus a few kilometers north of Georgia. According to NATO sources, the attack was made using a projectile artillery and the “clean” bomb created a detonation of 1.5 kilotons. Just 0.5 above the nuclear ban decreed by the United Nations following the signing of the treaties of nuclear non-proliferation between the United States and the former Soviet Union.
[Channel 56. Multivisión]
The leader of NATO’s joint command made public its intention to mobilize troops in the interior of Europe to put an end to what they’re calling “minor outbreaks of population infected with the Z virus.” Cities such as Warsaw, Prague, and Budapest have had to be placed under quarantine after the outbreak of the second mutation of the Z virus.
The old woman stopped flipping channels and began to watch the news program that was already concluding. Then the image began to distort. The old woman got up slowly and gave the set a few whacks. The image quickly returned and the old woman sat down again. Five minutes later she turned the television off. They didn’t have a soap opera until nine. She knew that, but continued to try her luck. “Maybe they’ve got something interesting on,” she usually said.
Mama knew I was arriving because of the barking from the neighbors’ house next door. I’d barely come in when she emerged from the kitchen and intercepted me before I could reach my room.
“Did you bring the paper from work?”
“I couldn’t, I’ll bring it tomorrow.”
“But Ricardo Miguel, you know that Fernando won’t leave me in peace without going on about that paper for the Vigilancia.”
“Oh, Mama. Don’t worry. We already did the serious paperwork. The day before yesterday we went to the Oficoda and took care of the rationing. What could happen?”
“If Raphael were really a zombie, I wouldn’t worry. As long as I had the nerve to have one of those things in the house.”
“Mama!”
“It’s true. You know I feel. If one of those things bites you you’re dead even if you escape the grave. But the fact is that we can be found out if that nosy CDR president finds out.”
“Mama, the CDR isn’t like it was in the ‘70s. Now they just hand out Chinese televisions and try to stick their noses into your business.”
“Don’t think that just because there are now stores and dollars, the Revolution has changed. The old mechanisms still function. In the 80s, they took away your grandfather’s telephone for having a child in the United States. And if this man next door gets it into his head to verify this business with your brother, they can even kick you out of your job. Don’t fool yourself. Go find another paper that certifies that your brother is more zombie than all those who appear on the news biting those people out there.”
“That’s enough, Mama.”
“And it’s your turn to go to the Committee meeting.”
“What?”
“Your friend the president wants you to talk about zombies and the work you’re doing in the CIDEZ. It’ll always be better if you talk than if they argue about another meditation on Fidel, no?”
“Damn it all to hell! As tired as I am...”
The meeting was as absurd as any other that I’d already attended. In fact, all of them have been equally absurd since they were created. In some house, whether because the owner is a militant of the party or needs a letter from the Committee for a telephone to be installed, a table is set up with a tablecloth as corny as one used for a one-year-old’s birthday party. The Cuban flag is hung up and behind the table sits the comrade president of the CDR, the comrade from the Vigilancia, and someone who holds a position called “the ideologist,”, which can sound like someone who brainwashes people but in practice is the person in charge of updating the mural.
The mural is something that needs its own explanation. Every CDR has one, therefore in theory every neighborhood in the city should have one. It is a piece of wood, pasteboard or thick cardboard, decorated with all the bad taste of a young girl’s quinceñera dress. Then fragments of stories from the newspaper are pinned to it. Stories that everyone has read, which are usually old because no one updates it and no one cares about it.
Before them, standing and randomly spread out across the sidewalk and the street, is the audience. Old people who have nothing to do or belong to the Association of Combatants, housewives who constantly check their watches so they don’t miss the start of the Brazilian soap opera, officials from companies and state organizations that need an image of militancy although they only care about the prices of automotive parts on the black market. The classic CDR members. The living image of the neighborhood.
So, the meeting began like any political act: by singing the national anthem. The song is not just a symbol of the fatherland but it is also an hymn to the war of independence. Now imagine an almost pathetic group of housewives concerned about their telenovelas and workers who are dying to go to bed, trying to sing a patriotic song that was conceived as a battle hymn.
Al combate corred bayameses
Que la Patria os contempla…
You can’t sing an hymn like that while hoping that it’s over before you start. You just can’t, or the result is the living image of decline. With each stanza, the poetic battlecry dwindled in tone until it resembled a bolero.
Que morir por la Patria es vivir.
By the final stanza, the song was now a whisper.
There is nothing more decadent.
“Well, we’re going to start the meeting of our CDR number 23,” Ramón, the president, started to say. “Comrade Felipe, block ideologist, will read for us a fragment of...”
And thus began a long-winded speech that didn’t do more than repeat what was said all the time on television and in the newspapers. First they read a pamphlet explaining how bad shape the world is in and how well things are going for us. Then they spoke of the need for neighbors to stop turning on the lights in the doorways at night. There were some protests by those in attendance. These murmurs ended when the president said that, if the electric company couldn’t resolve the public lighting problem in our neighborhood, it was the duty of the revolutionaries to illuminate the street with the light from their homes. There were a few complaints about the price of electricity and the president wound up speaking badly of the embargo and the president of the United States. I didn’t understand the logic of his t
hought process, but the end result was that the discussion was concluded.
As a second agenda item, the president introduced me and told them that I would speak to them about CIDEZ’s work. He had no need to introduce me, of course, because everyone had known me since I was little. And they knew of every stone I threw that broke a window, of every university girlfriend that I kissed in my doorway. They even knew the grades of every course I passed, both for my degree and my post-grad degree. It’s what’s awful about all living in the same place.
I began to explain to them about CIDEZ’s efforts to develop a vaccine against the Z virus. I told them that we treat the zombies as infected persons and not as walking cadavers. I spoke to them about how incorrect it was to say zombie when in reality people say zombí, a word in Creole, the language spoken in Haiti. I told them the story of Bokor, a sort of dark mage with the power to revive the dead, who had formed a brigade of sugar cane workers from the dead which he used without paying them. The families of the dead recognized their loved ones, who they had thought were buried. They persecuted the dark mage for converting them into zombies and returned the dead to their tombs.
I had barely finished the story when the problems started. It seemed as if no one had understood anything. Especially not the president of the CDR, who got up from his chair and stared daggers at me.
“One moment, Comrade. Are you trying to say that in our country, a dark mage governs who uses the living dead as slaves?”
“I never said such a thing, Fernando... what I meant to say was...”
“Everyone knows that the Z virus was created by the CIA to attack third world countries. There, in the United States, things got out of their control. But we knew, as the Comandante said, to turn the setback into a victory. Now the zombies are a weapon of the Revolution. They’re used to cut cane during the sugar harvest, but they’re not slaves, no... They’re zombie revolutionaries!”
“But I...”
“We are not going to allow any attempts to destabilizes us with those absurd stories invented by the enemy...”
And he kept talking. And talking. Or rather insulting. And repeating stock phrases about the revolution, socialism, and zombies. First I tried to explain to him that precisely the use of the zombies in the sugar harvest or in the May first parades was possible thanks to the CIDEZ serum which allowed the living dead to slightly develop their primary reflexes, diminishing their uncontrollable impulse to eat and thereby allowing the zombie to react to certain simple orders. But I was wasting my breath. He didn’t understand anything. Then I tried to retract myself a little. I said that a parallel with the Haitian legend could never have occurred. That the intention of the Revolution was right in trying to assimilate the zombie problem in a dialectic fashion. In the end, a legend is just a legend. He didn’t understand any of it. He merely stopped, with his arms crossed, and said, “And, moreover, everyone knows that in Haiti they speak Patuá.”
Patuá is the most-racist and colonialist way to describe Creole. It began as a joke about the way the Haitian slaves spoke and wound up becoming a custom among the white men. In many places it was even a joke. There was nothing more to add. Well, yes, there was the phrase Me cago en el coño de tu madre, you fat racist, but the television at home was broken. Rumors had leaked out that they would deliver Chinese televisions to those people whose units were very old or were broken, another campaign of the Revolution. Of course, like everything else, the distribution would be through the CDR and if I made the unforgivable mistake of calling our CDR president a racist, or what’s worse, fat, there wouldn’t be enough televisions for abuela to get one. All that without taking into account the tiny detail that Rafael wasn’t a real zombie. Things could get complicated, and I could even lose my job if the flames reached the CIDEZ. So I decided to bite my tongue and endure his insults in front of the entire neighborhood.
Before I went home, I went and stood at the corner were Panchito was playing zombie with some friends from the neighborhood.
“So, how did the meeting go?” Julián asked while he loudly placed a tile on the table.
“I was this close to telling off Ramón.”
“That would’ve been great. You sending that guy to the carajo. Come on, tell us, this is better than the telenovelas.”
And I told them. In part, because I had to tell someone or I was going to explode. I needed some understanding or I’d wind up throwing stones at the house of the president of the CDR until it fell down, something that wasn’t a very good idea from a rational perspective, but at that moment I wasn’t a rational being. That’s why I needed to talk, so I could be reasonable again.
But it’s also true that I was giving in to the adolescent within me. I, the person with the highest scientific cachet in the neighborhood, the only one who went to university and who wound up working in the most-prestigious institute of the scientific area, had been publicly humiliated by that fat informer. That’s why I was there, talking loudly late into the night, with the layabouts, the losers, the antisocial elements that neither studied nor worked, with the people who were looked down on because they lived by the hustle, by black market dealings, by selling what they stole from the state warehouses. They are always looked down upon because they play dominoes on Monday morning when everyone goes off to work even though they don’t want to go they go. Because they have to. Because they have no other choice. Because that’s what decent, hard-working revolutionary people do.
But no one ever reprimands them for making a racket until late, no one goes for the police or points their finger at them, no one is that good a revolutionary. Because no one is crazy. Some fear the scandal, others a violent confrontation, but all fear them because when the milk for the children runs out at the bodega, they need to turn to them. Just like for meat or oil. Because they “solve things.” They look here and there, without caring how legal things are. They’re delinquents, but they’ve fed half the neighborhood.
“My brother, you’re crazy. How did it occur to you to try to explain to that group of die hard commies what a bokor or a zombie is? And even less, to tell them a story where there’s an old man who exploits zombies. You know that they’re looking for double meanings all the time, combing through your words for some offensive comment against Fidel to earn points at your expense. If you tell them the story of the hunchbacked little pony, they’re not going to listen to the Russian epic, they’re going to say you’re making fun of Fidel by calling him El Caballo.”
“My bad. But I learned my lesson.”
“That’s it, my man. Low profile so they don’t mess with you. Don’t draw attention. You’re smart and you studied. In the end, you’ll get a hang of this.”
I returned home tired and didn’t hear the dog in the house next to ours. I don’t mean Ramón’s Doberman but Amanda’s dachshund. It was strange for it not to bark at my appearance at this time of night. The bulb of the street lamp was broken, so the street was dark. I looked around, a little lightheaded from sleepiness. The night was cool and clear. At the end of the street, I noticed someone walking. With slow steps. Like someone dragging their feet. Zombie steps.
I live at the end of a dead-end street and those steps came from the wall at the end of the street. If something, or someone, was walking from there it meant that they’d spent all night waiting to start walking now. But waiting for what? Or for whom? If it were human, I would think of an attack, but a zombie... there was no reason for a zombie to spend all night waiting for someone living. At least unless... no, it couldn’t be. Our zombies are peaceful. I myself work where they inject them with the serum that makes them docile.
The footsteps continued, becoming louder, coming closer. Toward me. The hair on the back of my neck stood up. An irrational fear came over me. I hurried to open the gate. As is natural, the more you hurry and the more nervous you are, the more you wind up fumbling with the iron grate and the longer it takes you to get inside. As I undid the lock, I looked behind me and managed to glimpse a s
ilhouette wobbling toward me. Its glassy eyes reflecting the light of the moon. I opened the door. It was, in effect, one of them. Someone infected by the Z virus, a walking dead, a zombie. I withdrew into my house as he continued walking toward me. I slammed the grate shut. The door shut in his face, but he didn’t care. Clinically, they’re dead, they don’t care about anything.
In other countries, they only think about eating, in biting everything before them and, along the way, infecting you with the virus in their saliva. Ours are not like that. They have a little more cerebral activity, which dulls their hunger and aggression. At least, unless this one wasn’t inoculated with the serum.
He bumped against the grate, bumped again before stopping. Normally they don’t see anything, but they have a strong sense of smell. He made no sound, didn’t bare his teeth against the fence. He remained there, pressed against the grate, watching me with his empty eyes, unable to see me. Just an ownerless zombie, lost or abandoned. A zombie without ownership papers, without a CIDEZ certificate. But inoculated with the serum at some point. I stood there watching the street zombie for a while. It tried to advance and again crashed against the fence.
Terra Nova: An Anthology of Contemporary Spanish Science Fiction Page 12
