Anyhow, the same thing sort of goes with exertion or getting tired or whatever. I don't get "tired" in any conventional sense of the word. I can sit down in a chair if I want to, but I never need to. I can walk (or jog awkwardly) for days without ever needing to "rest" in the way you do. Sitting is as good as standing. Walking is the same as sitting still.
Yet, lest you think that this feels like having a superpower-like I'm "Rechargeable Battery Man," a superhero whose energy can never be drained-allow me to also note the terrible "awareness" that goes along with being a zombie.
You see, even though I can't feel tired or hungry or like I have to take an enormous shit, I can feel my body breaking down. It's that same kind of "informational" feeling. It's like being handed a telegram saying: "Your toes are starting to rot away," or "The tip of your penis is turning black and hard." And I think it would be easier to take if I were less aware. Less sentient. (More on this later. Let me not get ... ahead ... of myself.) But, as it stands, I notice when the vitreous humors in my eyes start to molder, or my fingernails fall off, or my ears dry and shrivel like apricots. I am aware of all this, and yet, I can do nothing about it.
The more rotted and decomposed a zombie is, the more slowly it moves. This is because-on that animal level of "awareness"-a zombie understands how precarious its body is. Joints are ceasing to work properly. Synovial fluids have evaporated. A thousand functions and processes that have always kept things moving smoothly have forever disappeared. A zombie in advanced decomposition must feel like a snail with no slime left. (Whereas once, it never thought about having slime-it just moved without thinking about it-the snail now drags itself along horribly, feeling each grain of sand grate into its underside. I think that even the stupidest, least-aware zombie has some animal understanding that it can destroy itself if it's not careful.).
And so ... Zombies creep. Zombies shuffle. Zombies lurk. But zombies make a point not to overtax the precious sinews and muscles still holding them together.
Even I must face that this fate awaits me. I am not immune. One day my movement will become even more difficult than it already is, and then, impossible. My abilities to move and function will break down one by one until I am left a blind, shuddering, damned thing, perhaps inching my way forward like a worm along the ground.
My ability to anticipate this fate will not save me from it.
But...
At the point where our tale stands, I was in a body that was still working remarkably well. My lack of fatigue let me be as close as ever I would to feeling like I had a superpower. Also, it was cold. Freezing. And weather is important for zombies. I shudder to think of my poor colleagues born into tropical climes, for they have only a few weeks before serious and irrevocable deterioration sets in. The cold, you see, slows the process. It is natural refrigeration. And though it keeps one a bit stiff, the cold delays (or prevents completely) the many malfunctions of the body that come along with being a rotting corpse.
As I paced back and forth along that freezing hilltop in Ohio, the winter chill did me more good than I then knew.
I was angry and confused. I felt lost. None of this made sense. It was hard to deal with the feelings because my spotty memory gave me no frame of reference. Usually, when you're going through hard times, it helps to think of tight spots in your past that you've managed to survive. They give you confidence. You think to yourself: "Hell, if I got through that, I should certainly be able to survive this challenge." Or when you do something that makes you feel like a real bastard-stealing, lying, fucking around-maybe you think back and remember some of the good things you've done, and then you decide you might not be such a complete shit after all.
But I had no frame of reference. I could remember nothing more difficult than the situation in which I found myself, because I could more or less remember nothing. Period. Simply put, I did not know what kind of a man I was.
According to my colleague, Sam, I was a disappointment and a philanderer. According to the massive collection of scotch bottles in my kitchen, I was a high-functioning alcoholic. According to the suspicions lurking in my girlfriend's eyes, I was the kind of man who could or would wrong a woman.
Those were the negatives, but there were some positive traits too.
I was a professor at a good college with a fancy degree from an Ivy League. I was an only friend to a lonely man who felt like an outcast. And, despite my faults, there was a woman out there who loved me.
I had just eaten a man's brain, true-but even there I saw signs pointing toward a redemption of some sort. I had protected a small girl (and perhaps an entire houseful of women) from a rapist or murderer. And I had spared a woman I hardly knew (but whom I knew loved me) the angst of knowing that her beloved had become a member of the walking dead.
"The walking dead, indeed," I thought to myself. For indeed, I walked. I paced that hilltop feverishly, looking at the ground and, occasionally, at the empty wire spool, out of place and large as a coffee table. I walked in meandering lines, and I walked in tight circles. Sometimes I walked a crazy, crooked wobble. Sometimes I pivoted suddenly, as though trying to escape from an invisible tail.
Something in me-either human or zombie-told me to keep moving (even if it was only back and forth across the same hilltop). To pause and take stock of things in the middle of a crisis would benefit me in no way. "When you're going through hell, keep going." That was a famous quote. I had read it somewhere.
I had to keep going. But where?
I paced that hilltop long into what had already been a very long night. My only guest was a single wild turkey, ugly and wattled, with a face like a melted candle. Black as the night itself, it emerged from the frozen forest and lingered near the spool. At first, I paid it little notice, and for a while it only watched me. Then, as I made turn after turn around the top of the hill, it began following me. It trailed after me at a distance, like a balloon on a string trailing after a child.
At first, it was amusing. Then it became confusing. Was a turkey following me? Intentionally? I doubted it was happening. Did it think that I had food-or that I was food? Perhaps my dead zombie-flesh released an appetizing smell? But, no. Wild turkeys were not known as carrion birds. (I pictured them eating bugs and worms and things that scuttled on the ground.)
Only one thing was certain: This was a persistent turkey, and seemed as tireless as I. (There were no actual zombie-animals. I recalled Sam saying, during our walk from my house to the graveyard, that animal corpses had been mysteriously unaffected. For whatever reason, it was only humans that rose from their deathly slumbers.)
Thus, the turkey was not explained. All night, it kept me company as I paced the hilltop. Now and then I would lose track of the bird, yet it always reappeared within a few minutes.
I sat down on the spool as dawn neared, if only to have a stationary view of the sunrise. The bird approached, and lingered perhaps five paces away. Forgetting my guest entirely, I let the only words I would speak aloud on that hilltop escape my icy lips.
"What ... the ... fuck?"
At whom this question was directed, I could not have then said. (Nor can I now.) I suppose a cleverer man-or zombie-would have asked the universe something useful, like: "What the fuck am I supposed to do with myself now?" Or: "What the fuck becomes of a zombie?" Or simply: "What next?"
The sun rose. There was no answer.
Then the turkey clucked. An ugly noise-almost as ugly as the bird itself I smiled at the turkey, as if to say, No, that's not really the answer I was looking for, but thanks for trying. Then the bird walked down the side of the hill. I sighed superfluously and stood up from the spool. The bird toddled along ahead of me. Our roles reversed, I lumbered after it.
The grass was slick with snow, and the turkey passed out of sight for a moment ahead of me. When I caught up to it, I discovered the bird standing-deliberately, it seemed-on the seat of the waiting ATV.
It was right, of course. I could not stay here. Movement. Travel. Explor
ation. These were the only things that could sate the questions in my soul. These were the things a zombie knew. I was hungry for answers (and perhaps also brains). I wanted to know what the fuck had happened-what exactly the fuck had happenedand what it meant for me.
As I neared the four-wheeler, the bird hopped off, as if to make room for me. (It was all so uncanny.) Then I had another thought. Was I, Peter Mellor, a mystical type? (I remembered so little about my prior self.) Perhaps I had communed with animals like a Catholic saint or a National Geographic reporter. Perhaps I saw portents in the weather, in tarot cards, or in ... the behavior of animals?
This bird was no doubt behaving strangely. I felt that if I were a living, heart-pumping, lungs-breathing man, I'd be inclined to interpret the actions of my odd avian visitor as a "sign" of something. It would be interpreted as a nod-a discreet pssst-from the universe or from God. (Whatever you like.) But did the universe have anything left to say to a zombie? Did a brain-eating, skin-rotting zombie get to have mystical encounters with the unknown?
I didn't feel like it did. Instead, I felt that my status as a member of the walking dead meant that my story was somehow over. Zombies were lost, lonely wanderers, weren't they? Our time in the world was finished in some crucial way (though we were still, quite clearly, standing right there). We were the dead. The used-up. The rotting.
Did the great, magical universe-the same universe that sent omens to kings in the clouds, or to witches in the form of tea leaves-have anything left to say to zombies?
I started the ATV and began my slow descent from the hill. When I remembered to crane my neck to look back and see what had become of the turkey, it had disappeared.
I piloted the Kawasaki down quiet back roads until I came to a two-lane highway. The sun rose, and it stopped snowing. The temperature also rose. My sense of smell was more or less still intact, and morning in the countryside smelled good. With no clear destination in mind, I headed west along the shoulder of the highway. I wondered if I knew these roads, or if this was the same highway Sam had taken as we'd driven to Kate's house. I could not be certain.
I let my first impulse guide me. I drove on autopilot, like this was a commute home from a job I'd had forever. This was the way I always went, I told myself.
And so I went.
For perhaps an hour, I saw no one.
The day was calm. The sky was gray, the road eerily quiet. Then, far off to my right in a field, I noticed an Amish man walking next to a horse. He was a hundred yards away, but I made out his dark form instantly against the field, as white as a page. The horse was dark too. They were impossible to miss. I had a feeling of deja vu, and a thought.
"They always wave," my spotty memory said to me.
Huh? I thought. Wave? Are you serious?
"If you wave at an Amish person, they always wave back," my memory insisted. "They have to-it's like a rule or something. Even if they're busy. Even if they're plowing a field or working a butter churn. Even if they dislike you personally. If you pass an Amish person-on foot or in a car-and you wave to them, they have to wave back."
Okay then, memory, I thought. Here goes.
I slowed the ATV to a crawl and did a big back-and-forth "Hello" wave with my right hand. The Amish man turned his head and regarded me for a moment, and then kept walking. No wave. No nothing.
Nice job, memory, I thought to myself.
But although those were the words I consciously formed in my mind, another part of me knew that my memory was probably correct. Amish people did have to wave, and under normal circumstances, that was what you could expect from them. But these were hardly normal circumstances.
I looked at the Amish man again and discerned a shotgun tied to the side of his horse, along with a sack of cornmeal.
Could Amish people carry guns? Was that within "the rules"? My memory had nothing to say on this question. Clearly, however, at least one Amish guy was packing, and he was just a Hail Mary away from me.
I took the ATV back up to speed, and the Amish man soon vanished into the whiteness behind me.
I continued down the two-lane highway. To my right and left were muddied creeks and frozen, snowy woods. I kept my eyes peeled for man or beast (or zombie), but saw nothing.
(Speaking of eyes, it was at this point I noticed that my eyes no longer lubricated themselves. There was, for me, no pain associated with this, but it seemed my eyes rolled more slowly in their sockets than they had before. I no longer produced tears. At one point, I pulled over to the side of the road and put some snow into my eyes. This helped immeasurably, but the effects were frustratingly short-lived. Thus, I began to understand the physiology behind the "zombie stare." [You know the one. Eyes open wide, fixed straight ahead.] I began to envision a future for myself where looking to the side would only be possible by craning my neck. But then how long, I wondered, until my neck starts to go?)
After another hour, I passed through a small "town" called Galen, with an ancient welcome sign but no stoplight. It had perhaps fifteen homes and two or three businesses. No post office. One gas station. (This got me to thinking about fuel, but the gauge on my Kawasaki said I still had about half a tank left.) It appeared the posted prices had gotten up to $35 a gallon before the hastily scrawled NO GAS sign had been stuck to the door and the windows shuttered.
But at least one home in Galen showed signs of life: a three-story Federal-style monstrosity, replete with American-flag bunting. The lights were out, but healthy plumes of blue smoke roared forth from two red chimneys. I thought, as I passed it, that I caught a whiff of coffee above the stench of my own engine. An embroidered sign hanging on the side door of the house read JESUS IS WATCHING OVER THIS PLACE. Someone had propped a shotgun next to the sign as well-just to show that JESUS had some backup.
The sun drew higher in the sky. It was warming and pleasant, and a smile came to my frozen lips. I realized, with a little alarm, that I was feeling good. I had relaxed. I was enjoying the rideletting my intuition guide me along the empty road. Seriously, "enjoyment" is the word.
In some weird way, it felt good-not just having the highway to myself, but being a zombie riding a four-wheeler. "Maybe I'm a reanimated corpse with no memory," I thought to myself, "but right now I am master of this universe. I don't need anything. I don't want for anything. And I am damn-near invincible."
I stared at the shuttered farmhouses here and there, and thought about how all the humans around me were terrified. They were afraid of zombies, afraid of other humans, and afraid of starving to death. I was above such concerns. I smiled down from my Kawasaki with the swagger of the immune. I smiled like a New Yorker on vacation-the rest of the world's "efforts" and "concerns" quaint and provincial by my standards. In this grotesque carnival at the end of the world, I took a definite pleasure from my seated position. (Plus, ATVs are fun. Seriously. Have you ever ridden one? If not, you're really missing out.)
Anyhow, about an hour past Galen, the highway crested a hill and I saw a vehicle stopped on the shoulder. Truth be told, I was distracted and almost crashed into it. It was a black Harley-Davidson Road King with a sidecar. A man in a new-looking leather jacket was slumped forward over the handlebars. He wore a motorcycle helmet and a thin coating of snow. In the sidecar was a young boy of perhaps five or six, bundled many times over against the winter chill. In his right hand he held a bag of potato chips. He had heard my engine approaching and was standing up in the sidecar, facing me as I came into view.
I could tell the man was dead before I stopped the ATV.
I silenced my engine, dismounted, and approached the child warily. The dead man wore a holster with a gun in it on his side. It was unlikely a small child would have a weapon, too, but these were clearly different times. Anything was possible.
I looked them both over carefully.
"My dad died," the boy said flatly. (I say "boy," but the child's gender was unguessable at this point, he was concealed beneath so many layers of coats and scarves.)
I nodded at the boy, and gently approached the body of his father. The boy only watched.
I pulled the head up and gave the corpse a cursory inspection. The dead man (perhaps fifty years old, bristly mustache, nicotinestained teeth, maybe Hispanic) wore no expression. His clothes were thick against the chill like his son's, but I could detect no sign of injury upon him. He did not look sickly or unwell.
"What happened?" I asked in my raspy voice.
"He pulled over," the boy said. "He said his chest was hurting, and he was holding his chest. Then he died." From the snowfall on the body, I guessed the boy (and the decedent) had been out here for at least four or five hours.
"Where were you going, you and your father?" I asked him.
"My aunt who lives in Columbus's house," the boy managed. "My dad says ... My dad said there aren't zombies in Columbus. They have the army and police."
"Are you cold?" I asked the boy.
He seemed to consider the question seriously, then shrugged.
"We should ... get you inside," I said huskily. And I was pleased at how easily this conclusion came to me-that saving this child's life was the first impulse I had.
First impulse ... Did I also have an urge to ... do things to that child, the way I had "done things" to the woolly man whose ATV I now rode? I have to be honest. That was there. Eating his brain would have felt good. I understood that I would have liked it, and I understood that it was obtainable. It would have been an easy thing to chow down on a cold, defenseless child, paralyzed by fear and the loss of his father. (And-let me stress this again-it also would have felt really good.)
But there was also a part of me that understood this was a child. You know? A fucking child. I stood back a moment and looked at the empty fields around us.
I had to get the kid inside. The only question was where.
I scanned the horizon in my direction of travel, finding only forest and more farms ahead. How many miles until the next town? I had no idea. (I hadn't really been paying attention to road signs as I passed them, and this part of Ohio all looked the same. Mansfield. Coshocton. Mount Vernon. Who knew what might he up the road.)
Zombie, Ohio Page 8
