The Making of Zombie Wars

by Aleksandar Hemon

  “All right, let’s go find her!” Stagger said. He managed to get out from under his chair without banging his head. He was skilled at this. Pretty good at crawling on the ground intoxicated. Must be his marine training.

  “It’s two in the morning.” Joshua spoke from under the chair. “Who knows where she could be?”

  “I go find her,” Ana Except said. “You stay here and wait if she comes.”

  “At two in the morning every creep in the city is out,” Stagger said.

  The fattie was nowhere to be found and Joshua was now worried that it had rolled under the porch, on a pile of dried leaves or rat bones or whatever was down there, which must’ve already started smoldering and would soon ignite the porch. They needed to get off the porch, he needed to get off the floor and then down the stairs and then to safety, from where he could watch the spectacular blaze. The Greater Chicago Fire. Once everything burned to the ground, the rebuilding could start. Operation American Freedom.

  He looked up to urge Stagger and Ana to run for their lives when he saw the fattie, now diminished to a roach. Stagger was sucking on it as if it were a pacifier. It was flummoxing how Stagger kept pulling out those joints, the resourceful bastard. They would disappear, then reappear in his hand, all part of a magical cycle of being and nonbeing. Fucking sombrero. Joshua got up and plopped into a chair. What was it that Stagger made him smoke? Good shit. The Lord shall always provide the good shit, the things that matter. I will not die so I may live, and recount the deeds of God with care and precision.

  “I been calling,” Ana Except said. “Esko is not pick up the phone. I worry.”

  “All right. Let’s go!” Stagger said without moving.

  “Where?” Joshua asked.

  “To find the girl.”

  “We don’t have a car,” Joshua said.

  “We got a car,” Stagger said.

  “What car?”

  “I got a car.”

  “When did you get a car?”

  “Maybe you can call Bega,” Ana Except said. “Maybe he can go to see.”

  “I’ve always had a car,” Stagger said. “Exactly for situations like this.”

  “I’ve never seen you driving a car,” Joshua said.

  “Bega maybe can see if she is home,” Ana pleaded. Why can’t she call Bega? Joshua began thinking, but then he stopped. Thinking without producing a thought, that’s what he was good at. That and nightingales.

  “I’ve never had a situation like this,” Stagger said.

  “That’s true,” Joshua said.

  “I am worry,” Ana Except said. “I call Esko. I don’t have Bega’s phone.”

  “I can call,” Joshua said. “But I don’t have his number.”

  “We gotta go. I need my weapon,” Stagger said.

  “Let’s call first,” Joshua said. “Let’s think straight.”

  “We gotta go. We can’t just sit here and do nothing. We gotta do what’s right,” Stagger said. “I need my weapon of ass destruction.”

  “You don’t have to go. Joshua can call,” Ana Except said.

  “Who’s he gonna call?” Stagger said. “Who’re you gonna call, Jonjo?”

  “I don’t know,” Joshua said. “Bega. I don’t have his phone number.”

  “See?” Stagger said. “We gotta go.”

  “Fucking sombrero,” Joshua said. “I can’t think straight.”

  “Let’s roll,” Stagger said.

  EXT. CORNFIELD — NIGHT

  Suddenly, Major K hears a zombie HOWL of a different quality, communicating something. Another HOWL responds. Ruth freezes, as does Young Woman. Major K slowly unties the straps and lets Jack down onto the ground. He makes him lie facedown, then signals to the women to do the same. He listens closely: the RUSTLING of corn, the TRUDGING of the zombies, the HOWLING. Abruptly, everything goes silent except for an obscure NIGHTINGALE. Jack’s eyes open wide.

  Stagger had quite a bit of trouble getting the car out of the garage, not least because it was buried under a mountain of boxes and crates of beer bottles and Cubs paraphernalia. It was an ancient lily-colored Cadillac, as wide and graceful as a hovercraft, the license plate reading STAG. He then had trouble getting out of the alley, because all the garbage cans had been pushed out to the middle by some local teenage prickster, so Stagger just barged through the cordon of cans, spilling the trash for rats to enjoy. I am surrounded by my enemies, in the name of the Lord, I will spill their guts like alley trash.

  “Go straight,” Joshua demanded, even if there was no street to turn off to. Stagger was practically levitating above his seat, his chin every now and then hitting his chest, which helped him snap awake. He was going maddeningly slowly, the weight of his forearms, one of them in a cast, pressing the steering wheel and the axle and the wheels and Joshua, who could smell the burning steel. The night was menacingly dark, as if some powerful force had switched off all the street lighting, setting the stage for a hedgehog-fucking invasion of rabid zombies. Script Idea #196: A rock star high out of his mind freaks out during his show, runs off the stage, and finds himself lost in a city whose name he can’t recall, but whose streets are crowded with his hallucinations. A teenage fan discovers him trembling behind a garbage container, begging the Lord to get him out of his trip. The teen decides to keep the rock star for himself for the night. Mishaps and adventures follow. This one could be a musical: Singin’ in the Brain.

  Now that they had some kind of a goal to focus on, the buzz was fading, and for the better, except that nausea set in. Ana occupied the backseat in anabashedly judgmental silence. Joshua feared turning to look at her, after he’d done it once and her face was obscure; his revolution nearly made him sick. Did she understand how high they were? He received the wavelengths of anxiety Ana’s body emitted, her loneliness and angry worry, but did she understand? He should be doing something about all that. He should turn and understandingly squeeze Ana’s hand, rub her knee, say something funny. But his cheek hurt, and he was sure she’d have nothing but contempt for his empty gestures. And he couldn’t bear moving his head back and forth. His brain must have shrunk and was now rattling around in his cranium like a pea in Tupperware whenever he altered his position.

  Nana Elsa had once sat at Seder in absolute silence, except to read her lines from the Haggadah, every one of which had targeted Bernie and sounded as if coming directly from the very pissed Lord himself. All because she’d just learned that Bernie had squandered his family on a mistress. Perhaps he could tell Ana about Nana Elsa, about her being the toughest woman he’d ever known, surviving a camp, losing all her family, trekking across Europe, sailing across the Atlantic, to come to Chicago without a person in the world and work in a button factory. But it wasn’t clear how that could be comforting to Ana. Besides, turning back and forth was not a good idea, he was nauseated. He could think of no other thing to do, so he did nothing, and was thus forced to recognize that when seriously stoned he was in no way presenting his best self, even if Ana couldn’t see he was high. His best self was way out of town right now, pretty much crouching somewhere in the cornfields of Iowa. His second-best self was helpless, deployed solely to keep the food down. He held on to the dashboard. A speed bump alerted Stagger to the existence of the street and the car he was driving, if ever so slowly. The burst of unexpected consciousness allowed him to put down the hand brake, whence the car lurched forward and sped up.

  Somewhere along the way, Stagger and Joshua had come up with a plan: they’d first find out if Alma was abducted by Esko, who was still not picking up the phone. There was no way Ana could say no to that, because they were superdetermined. But their plan was immediately amended, because Stagger wouldn’t even consider going on a search mission without his weapon. Ana begged him to forget about it. Stoned as he was, Joshua knew it wasn’t a good idea, but Stagger was adamant about his goddamn sword. Adamant! Ana tried to convince him in her heartbroken English that Esko wasn’t violent (yeah, right!), that Stagger shouldn’t b
e handling a sharp blade with his broken arm, whereupon Stagger pressed the heels of his palms against the center of his steering wheel and honked furiously, exploding the nocturnal silence. So they were on their way to get the goddamn sword.

  “Go forward,” Joshua said.

  “Always straight, never forward,” Stagger said.

  Kimmy’s house was only a couple of blocks up the street, yet it took them forever to get there, during which time Joshua listened to Ana whimper, redial, and gasp in the backseat. He kept working on a statement of comfort for her, but all that his fattie-addled mind could in the end come up with was: “It will probably be okay.”

  She wore Joshua’s flannel shirt and looked, somehow, Midwestern. Probably was the wrong word. It will be okay was what he should have said. It shall be okay even better. Or: While there is no way to predict what will happen or what your personal circumstances will be, there are things we can do now. Kimmy would know what to say, and what to do, but she was the one person he could not call at this time, or ever again in his life. Stagger slammed the brakes and Joshua nearly cracked his nose against the dashboard. As long as the drive took, it wasn’t long enough for Joshua to figure out a way to get a samurai sword from behind the washing machine without waking Kimmy up. “Let’s think about this,” Joshua said. I remember what okay looks like and this is the exact opposite.

  Script Idea #200: A woman is besieged in her house by her demented ex-boyfriend and his insane sidekick. The only weapon she has to defend herself is an ancient samurai sword she inherited from her Japanese father. After much suspense and struggle, she slices the sidekick down the middle, like a dog. In the last scene, she stands over her ex-boyfriend with the sword in her hand, deliberating whether to decapitate or castrate him. Their eyes lock. “Kill me,” he says. She kills him. The end. Title: Assholes Also Die.

  “Stagger, I beg you, let’s forget about this,” Joshua tried again. “I’ll come back tomorrow and get your sword. I promise.”

  They stood in front of Kimmy’s house, away from the porch light, close to some unnameable bush, leafless and devastated by the winter, in which something rustled—a fuckable hedgehog, perhaps, or a nightingale. Ana stayed in the car, calling Esko repeatedly, receiving no answer. Stagger took off his Crocs and gave them to Joshua, as if saying farewell. Then he knelt and rubbed dirt all over his face and shirt and body, including his underwear and cast, which happily retained its blazing whiteness. Joshua longingly looked back toward the car, at Ana, who was pressing her phone against her ear, shaking her head at him, mouthing: “No!”

  “If you go in there, Stagger, she’ll call the police for sure, accuse you of rape. Unless she cuts you in half first. Please, let’s just forget about it.”

  “It’s behind the washing machine, correct?” Stagger whispered.

  “Correct,” Joshua said. “But you don’t even know where the laundry room is. I beg you—I’ll go get it tomorrow.”

  “It’s my weapon. It’s a marine thing to do,” Stagger said. “No man other than me should fall for my weapon.”

  “What are you talking about?” Joshua hissed in lieu of a whisper, grabbing Stagger’s cast. “Nobody’s going to fall. Come on, man! Let’s be grown up here!”

  Stagger looked down at the hand on his cast, then at Joshua. Very gently, he removed Joshua’s hand. He embraced him firmly and whispered something unintelligible into his ear. Then he slipped up the stairs to the porch, stepped onto the banister, gearing up to climb the downspout under Kimmy’s bedroom window. How was he going to do that with the cast?

  “Wait!” Joshua hissed. “I have a key!”

  “Take your shoes off,” Stagger ordered.

  “Wait!” Joshua said, and vomited.

  * * *

  It took him a while to find the key in his jacket pocket: movie tickets, coins, and whatnot—a lot of whatnot. Joshua pushed the door open without a single creak or crack, Stagger half-naked in his wake. Not so long ago Bushy had rubbed against Joshua’s shins; Bushy used to live here, now he’s dead, and his spirit could be anywhere, including nowhere. What did Kimmy do with his corpse? What do you do with dead animals? Once upon a time, Mom had put his green parakeet, his first and only pet, in the freezer upon its demise. For months it had remained among the tubs of kosher ice cream, and then, one day, it too had vanished.

  The house was lightless, indifferent. On the tip of his ex-marine toes, Stagger crept into the living room, then into the kitchen. Joshua wanted to stop him, but dared not produce a sound, his heart pounding like the drums along the Mohawk. Stagger finally turned around to spread his arms. The gesture should’ve meant that it was all clear, but with Stagger you never knew. Joshua followed him to the kitchen, where his hunger came back in a rush so powerful that he opened the fridge without thinking. This time, there was no beer. There was, however, a tray of sushi leftovers that looked reasonably edible and he grabbed it, closing the fridge door noiselessly. He placed a piece of California roll in his mouth, crushed it with his teeth, and swallowed, tasting enough of it to know that it was not fresh at all. He offered the tray to Stagger, who shrugged and grabbed a couple of unidentifiable pieces. The two men, one of them half-naked and tattooed, stood in the cold, mute darkness of Kimmy’s kitchen and ate leftover sushi—the little man in the crawl space knew this could make a compelling scene in some script. Joshua opened the freezer, and the smell of ice cream and frozen dead animals washed over him. How about a scene in Zombie Wars: A morgue worker takes out a tub of ice cream from an empty corpse-fridge compartment. He hears noise coming from the compartment next to it. Foolishly, he opens the noisy one, the pistachio ice cream still in hand.

  Chewing the last piece of sushi, Joshua pointed toward the laundry room and Stagger showed him thumbs up. All this wordless communication: it was well nigh troubling that he and Stagger understood each other so well. It would have to end, this buddy-buddy relationship, tonight, right after they got the sword without getting arrested, right after they tracked down Daughter Except, right after they fully descended from their high, as soon as the new day arrived. By the end of Passover, I’ll have moved back to my humble abode on Sanity Street.

  The dark house was fragrant of Kimmy’s life: the industrial smell of the carpet on the stairs, the shop scent of the tchotchkes on the coffee table, the ubiquitous lavender. He missed them all, all those smells, even the rancid sushi, all the meaningless sensory details of a well-governed life. By next Monday, he’ll have begged Kimmy to let him back in; he’ll have bought her a diamond ring. He’ll have said, again and better: That was not me! That was not me at all!

  The problem at hand, though, was that the samurai sword was stuck behind the washing machine and it couldn’t be retrieved without moving the cumbersome beast, which at three in the morning would surely be heard all the way to the police station. In the gloom of the laundry room they conferred in susurration: Joshua would go upstairs and keep an eye on the sleeping Kimmy and distract her if she woke up; meanwhile, Stagger would figure out a way to get the sword. “Good teamwork,” Stagger whispered in Joshua’s ear, his breath warm and foul.

  Step by slow soundless step, Joshua moved up the stairs, ninja-like. His diminishing high was now compounded by somnolent alertness: he touched the banister so lightly it felt half-existent, as if slow in rematerializing. He could hear the wall cracking infinitesimally; he spotted Bushy’s toy mouse—a little rubber monument to his absence—just before it squeaked under his foot. Kimmy must’ve been disabled with grief, unable to touch anything that belonged to Bushy, unable to remove the remnants of his presence—she surely missed him more than she did Joshua. Script Idea #204: Mr. Grief comes to your house to clean up after the final departure of your loved ones, providing all kinds of grief-management services. To do this, Mr. Grief has to lock up his own grief deep inside—the loss of his wife. But when he meets a grieving widow, his dead wife’s doppelganger, his Box of Grief (the title?) breaks open.

  He reached the top of t
he stairs. The bathroom was to the right, Kimmy’s office before him, her bedroom to the left. As per his orders, Joshua should’ve stayed there and watched out for any signs of Kimmy’s movement, acting to distract her only if she for some reason headed downstairs. But the door of Kimmy’s room was invitingly ajar, just enough so he could squeeze through it. His heart was break-dancing in his chest; his memorious dick made the first step toward erection, pointing in the direction of the ring and handcuffs.

  There stood Joshua, unpresent in the breathing darkness, taking in the stale lavender air of the slept-in room, the taste of vomit still in his mouth, his cheek burning. He moved along the wall, toward the deeper shadow, closer to her bed. She looked minuscule under the cover, practically bodiless, except for the dark smudge of her head on the pillow. Joshua froze and held his breath when he heard a screech coming from the laundry room. Still, Kimmy’s head did not move.

  Script Idea #205: A stalker creeps into the room of the woman he obsesses over, only to find her already dead. She filed a restraining order against him and now he is the prime suspect. Will he be able to find the real killer before the police track him down?

  He missed Kimmy. She was better than him, far too good for him. To be star-crossed, lovers have to belong to the same grade of human quality. Kimmy could love him only out of pity, and he could never believe she wouldn’t leave him for the Fourth or the Fifth, or some unnumbered Hummer hunk born into the same rarefied category as herself. Kimmy’s grade was honeymoon-in-Tokyo. Joshua’s was somewhere between dandruff survivor and leftover sushi.